MoviePass: The 'Get Big Fast' Strategy

Abstract

In August 2017, MoviePass dramatically lowered its subscription price from $50 per month to just $10 for up to one movie per day. The idea was to rapidly scale the business to the point where they could generate incremental revenue streams from related businesses (e.g., a share of ticket and concession revenues from theaters, advertising revenue from movie studios; and revenue from ride-sharing companies). Within two days, Moviepass had gotten 150k new subscribers; within six months, they had more than 2 million. But as of February 2018, the company faced three challenges: theaters were resisting the concept, investors were shorting the stock in record numbers, and competitors were beginning to appear. Could CEO Lowe convince investors that they did, indeed, have a viable business model and could monetize their growing subscriber base? At the same time, Lowe had to decide whether to raise subscription prices to cover the growing losses or keep prices low to attract subscribers as quickly as possible.

Mobileye was an Israeli company, officially headquartered in The Netherlands, which was a Tier 2 supplier to the global automobile industry. This short case updates Mobileye's business performance and strategy, following the acquisition by Intel in 2017.

In 2019 Walmart was still the world’s largest company, with over $500 billion in annual revenue and operations around the world. Although it had mostly vanquished its rival discount retailers in the U.S., it was struggling to find the right growth strategy. Facing a mature U.S. market, it had looked to ecommerce and international sales as an engine of growth. Walmart leadership also faced intense competition from dominant online retailer Amazon. In such a competitive environment, how should Walmart respond to the reality that its traditional strengths no longer guaranteed robust growth?